inquiries about the case. These marked the record right up until the case files and effects were sent to archives. After that, those who inquired about Anneke Jespersen were most likely ignored, as was the case they were calling about.
Curiously, the victim’s personal belongings were never returned to her family. The archive boxes contained the backpack and property that was turned over to the police several days after the murder, when the manager of the Travelodge on Santa Monica Boulevard matched the name on a riot victim list printed in the Times to the guest registry. It had been thought that Anneke Jespersen had skipped out on her room. The belongings she had left behind were put in a locked storage closet at the motel. Once the manager determined that Jespersen wasn’t coming back because she was dead, the backpack containing her property was delivered to the RCTF, which was working out of temporary offices at Central Division in downtown.
The backpack was in one of the archive boxes that Bosch had retrieved from case storage. It contained two pairs of jeans, four white cotton shirts, and assorted underwear and socks. Jespersen obviously traveled light, packing like a war correspondent even for a vacation. This was probably because she was heading straight back to war following her vacation in the United States. Her editor had told the Times that the newspaper was sending Jespersen directly from the States to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, where war had broken out just a few weeks earlier. Reports of mass rapes and ethnic cleansing were breaking in the media, and Jespersen was heading to the center of the war, due to leave the Monday after the riots erupted in Los Angeles. She probably considered the quick stop by L.A. to snap shots of rioters just a warm-up for what awaited in Bosnia.
Also in the pockets of the backpack were Jespersen’s Danish passport along with several packages of unused 35mm film.
Jespersen’s passport showed an INS entry stamp at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York six days before her death. According to the investigative records and the newspaper accounts, she had been traveling by herself and had made it to San Francisco when the verdicts came down in Los Angeles and the violence began.
None of the records or news stories accounted for where in the United States Jespersen had been during the five days leading up to the riots. It apparently wasn’t seen as germane to the investigation of her death.
What did seem clear was that the breakout of violence in Los Angeles was a strong pull to Jespersen and she immediately diverted, apparently driving through the night to Los Angeles in a rental car she had picked at San Francisco International. On Thursday morning, April 30, she presented her passport and Danish press credentials at the LAPD media office in order to get a press pass.
Bosch had spent most of 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam. He had encountered many journalists and photographers in the base camps and out in fire zones as well. In all of them, he had seen a unique form of fearlessness. Not a warrior’s fearlessness but almost a naive belief in one’s ultimate survival. It was as though they believed that their cameras and press passes were shields that would save them, no matter the circumstance.
He had known one photographer particularly well. His name was Hank Zinn and he worked for the Associated Press. He had once followed Bosch into a tunnel in Cu Chi. Zinn was the kind of guy who never turned down an opportunity to go out into Indian country and get what he called “the real thing.” He died in early 1970 when a Huey he had jumped onfor transport to the front was shot down. One of his cameras was recovered intact in the debris field and somebody at base developed the film. It turned out Zinn was shooting frames the whole time the chopper was taking fire and then going down. Whether he was valiantly documenting his own death or thinking he was going to have